As organizations continue to expand their operations, their ability to manage their assets (e.g., computers, servers, networks, software, and manufacturing equipment) becomes more difficult. This is due not only to the increased number of assets to be managed but also to the varying types of assets. For instance, assets that perform similar functions for the organization may not natively provide similar data for analyzing performance and health of the assets. This may make attempting to centrally analyze and/or manage the assets difficult.
Even the reporting of the operational condition, much less problems, with assets in a decent sized organization can be cumbersome. For example, daily operational “health checks” or production-readiness assessments may be assessed using time consuming methods of cascaded emails and voicemail messages and meetings just to report the once-daily status. These cascaded messages are difficult to manage, let alone respond to when problems occur.
If organizations begin to expand beyond their national borders, or even around the world, managing the assets from a central location is difficult because of the vast discrepancies in time zones. Thus, assets may need to be in operation while the central management is asleep. The expansion beyond national borders may also further exacerbate the problem of assets not providing similar data for analyzing performance and health of the assets. For example, a company may need to support its information technology (IT) system by collecting and analyzing data on hardware, software, and networks across hundreds of production environments in tens of countries. In such an environment, it could take days to answer relatively simple questions like: how many laptops are three years old, what incidents are affecting production, or what regional changes affect other regions. Moreover, based on the systems used to gather information, the answers sought could differ each time.